Mistake
by huffle-bibin
Summary: It was a mistake, letting him see her totem, letting him pull it off her neck, because the dead can still dream after all, and the knowledge of how to extract from their eternal sleep isn't that expensive.   Rated for dark themes and character death


Mistake

It was a mistake, letting him see her totem, letting him pull it off her neck, letting the necklacke she kept it on fall to the floor, because the dead can still dream after all, and the knowledge of how to extract from their eternal sleep isn't that expensive.

Rated for dark themes and character death.

Disclaimer: I don't own Inception. I am not amazing enough to have thought it up.

It was a mistake, letting him see her totem, letting him pull it off her neck, letting the necklace she kept it on fall to the floor with their already discarded clothing.

It was a mistake, just like that night. Every second of it was burned into her memory, burned with the same fire the vodka had. Arthur had approached her after the inception, had been the only person she could talk to that really understood (Eames was off in a dark corner doing who knows what to a blonde hussy and Yusuf and Cobb had both gone home. She couldn't blame them. If she had a home to go to she would be there.). So they talked, drank and kissed; nothing out of place for the seedy bar that they were in.

It was a mistake when she let him leave the next morning, hung over and hurt at her sober rejection of their drunken love. She watched with a tear in her eye as he walked away, neither a hair nor an article of clothing out of place as he disappeared into the morning mist.

It was a mistake to assume she would see him again. Cobb called her three days later, told her that Arthur was dead, murdered by a team of extractors hired by Saito to clean up after their job. He informed her that his children were gone, taken away by Miles to protect them from the men who killed Arthur and tortured Eames until he bled to death. Cobb only told her that Arthur's death wasn't as kind.

It was a mistake to guess that the extractors would physically destroy her. They physically destroyed Arthur and Eames, two hired into the job but not involved in the actual inception of the idea. She and Cobb were their true targets, the ones they really wanted to torture, to not just destroy but annihilate. The dead can still dream after all, and the knowledge of how to extract from their eternal sleep isn't that expensive.

It was a mistake to think that they weren't done with Cobb. They had gotten his children away from him while making him feel insecure; like he was a danger to everyone he loved. It wasn't long until he joined Arthur and Eames by way of a bullet through the head.

It was a mistake to believe that moving to Dancing Elk, Minnesota would help protect her from Saito's clean up team. One morning she woke up from a particularly vivid dream, her first since the inception job, and reached for her totem. Her hand brushed against a cold hard object that fell before she grabbed her totem. It tipped but didn't fall. She was dreaming.

It was a mistake, letting him see her totem, letting him pull it off her neck, letting the necklace she kept it on fall to the floor with their already discarded clothing. Her totem became one of his most closely guarded secrets, a secret kept by a lover for a lover. She would never understand how hard he fought to keep that of every other secret he kept safe from Saito's team. He couldn't, and now two totems weighted exactly opposite sat on her bedside table, the one she had knocked on the floor and the one eternally tipped but not fallen resting next to each other.

It was a mistake to try to find the real totem. She entered more dreams than she could count, knocked both totems down so many times that their always opposite reactions became as comforting as the assurance of reality had once been. The stress, the pressure, the never knowing what was really happening broke her. Her torture was the worst, the slow stripping of her friends, her family, her lover and her sanity from her soul until there was nothing left.

It was a mistake to hope she could discover the truth. She stood in the window of the hotel room Cobb and Mal had rented so long ago, one totem in each hand. She opened her hands and both totems plummeted towards the earth, the low thud of their landing masked by the sounds of traffic below. Ariadne followed their descent, the wind in her ears and the solid impact as her fall suddenly ended the only things that were real, the only things she _knew_ existed.

It was a mistake. Her blood pooled around the bishop fallen over.

* * *

"Do we really see each other for what we really are, or do we just see what we want to see, the image distorted by our own personal lenses? I lost someone today and the funny thing is, I don't even know who she was." Jeff Melvoin


End file.
